Building a Forever Company in Uncertain Times

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Dear Reader,   When your team asks you to build a forever company so “they can grow old here,” you smile and continue to do “the work.”   My first year of building Odetta was marked more by all the things that I did not do. Most notably, I did not take capital. I did not find a co-founder. I did not find a CTO, and I did not build technology from scratch. I did not hire a PR agency. I did not hire that impressive yet non-values aligned Harvard intern. There was a quiet voice inside of me that reacted negatively to all things that I was supposed to do. Going this unconventional route has actually paved the way for building a forever company - an outcome much more likely if you own your destiny. Within the first couple of years, after we survived the valley of death, it became clear we could build a company “for women by women” on our own terms, with a mindset of building something to last. Katharine Monthly Spotlight: Marketing and Growth Use Case for Founding Teams We are seeing an increase in usage by small teams led by engineers and product oriented founders who are outsourcing business functions as they grow from 0 to 10 employees. These founders ask us to perform intelligent list building and database segmentation. They request rapid sense making and research around a vertical. They usually ask their account manager to handle all marketing and automation flows within Hubspot and Salesforce. It's pretty smart to hold off on that expensive sales and marketing hire until you already have something they can scale. Learn More Founder Lesson Learned: Permission to be Great I was 37. I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not starting a company was more awful than the idea of starting a company that sucked. And so at last, I got to serious work on starting a company. There are a million and one ways to get stuck. I think back to all of the ways I held myself back. I thought I was too old. I thought I was not good enough. I thought I should have been prioritizing different things like the other people did. I thought why me? Ultimately you have to give yourself permission to be great. Client Testimonial “It was lovely meeting you and the additional members of your team yesterday as well. To be on an all-female call is incredible in B2B tech!” —CEO, SaaS Company Odettian Quote “Odetta is the home and missing puzzle piece I was always looking for. It is not just a workplace, however, a family of strong women who build each other every day no matter how hard things are for them. Kudos to this sisterhood. I hope to grow old here! Please build Odetta so that our daughters can one day work here too. We will show the world.” —Kiran, Project Lead, Odettian Quote of the Month “There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns — small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence — and lasted about ten seconds.”   —Robyn Davidson, author of Tracks, a true story of one woman's crossing of the Australian outback on camel. Copyright © 2022 Odetta, Inc., All rights reserved. San Francisco, CA subscribe here